CS Lewis and the Collapse of Modern Love
Why "Love is Love," Dissolves Love
Modern man may be skeptical about objective value, morality, and even meaning itself, but there remains one bastion he refuses to question:
Love is a universal human need.
And yet, despite our confidence in love, we remain more confused, lonely, and jaded about it than ever before. Dating is down, divorce is up, and there is widespread discord between man and woman.
Take a trip into the discourse of today’s dating shows, and you’ll hear charged rhetoric such as “women are selfish and entitled,” and “men are pathetic and incapable of commitment.”
Such is the irony of the sexual revolution, which promised liberation through “free love,” yet has resulted in the dissolution of love in every sense of the word.
What went wrong?
C. S. Lewis saw the problem clearly.
In The Four Loves, he argues that modern man has forgotten what love actually is. Under the slogan “love is love,” all distinctions have been flattened, and through said flattening, love itself has been dissolved.
The remedy, Lewis suggests, is to recover the classical structure and understanding of love. We must remember there are degrees of love, and these degrees must be properly ordered in the human soul.
And when you understand it, you have the capacity to reorder and “re-form,” your life in accordance with the love that governs the universe, or in other words, live a life of true love.
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What is Love?
Lewis first laments that in modern English we only have one word for love, which is… “love.”
He compares this with Ancient Greece, which had many terms for many different variations of love.
He then lists the four most important loves to track…
Affection
Lewis calls affection the most natural of human loves, and is sufficient for “9/10s of human happiness.”
This is the natural bond that one feels between one’s kin, most notably a parent’s love for their child.
The key nature of affection is that it’s fostered by familiarity and closeness, leading to an undiscriminating sort of love. It’s unconditional, but can become a vice because it loves without any reference to virtue, like a spoiled child whose vices are affirmed by an overly affectionate mother.
Friendship
Lewis calls friendship the least natural of human loves. It doesn’t arise as affection does, nor is it necessary for posterity.
And yet, Lewis reveres friendship deeply, while mourning that it’s a lost art in modern society.
Ancient philosophers like Aristotle said friendship was a necessity for one to reach their life’s purpose of flourishing in accordance with virtue. Medievalists celebrated the close bond of virtuous friends as necessary models of heroism and sanctity.
Moderns, by contrast, tend to associate friendship as nothing more than your neighborhood drinking buddy. Any examples of close friendship, especially among males, is not a sign of mutual virtue. In fact, close male friendship is often accused of repressed sexuality. The world would sooner believe that men are dominated by their carnal desires, rather than honing a selfless capacity of care for a friend’s soul.
Eros
Eros, or erotic love, is the strongest felt of all the loves. It’s not mere sexual desire, but the all-encompassing passion one feels for a newly beloved object of desire. Think of the proverbial “honey-moon phase,” of a new relationship.
This form of love is perhaps the most celebrated of the modern era, and for good reason — for there are fewer strong feelings of bliss than an impassioned experience of eros.
And yet, eros becomes the most dangerous, because it drives one to ruin when worshipped. Such worship, of being “in love with love,” leads to jealousy, neediness, distrust, and even infidelity.
Indeed, the heart of some of the greatest tragedies in literature come at the hands of eros, such as Romeo and Juliet’s suicides, or the plights of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
Natural Loves
And so we find this strange paradox. Love is a universal human need, and yet every single natural human love that Lewis identifies proves itself insufficient.
What is the solution to this conundrum?
There is still one love left — charity — and it’s far more than a natural affection:
It reorders the natural loves in your soul. It’s the difference between a life of harmony, or misery. And it shows you where you need to change if you find yourself falling short of true love.
